


Choices that are best made in the moonlight

by Teatrolley



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, a lot of kissing and a lot of plot happening in bedrooms, all of those things you could possibly need, two boys being in love and also being dumb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-06 01:32:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5397851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teatrolley/pseuds/Teatrolley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Harry never imagined that he’d someday know the feeling of Draco’s smiling lips against his own, or be able to replicate the exact tone of his during-sex laughter in his mind. Even then, he especially never imagined that, were he to ever know those things, he were also to be without them again. </p><p>Or, in other words: Harry and Draco break up."</p><p>_________________</p><p>Don't worry. There's a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choices that are best made in the moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> Next in the installment of I-write-too-much-when-I-should-be-revising. It could be a collection.

**After**

Harry never imagined that he’d someday know the feeling of Draco’s smiling lips against his own, or be able to replicate the exact tone of his during-sex laughter in his mind. Even then, he especially never imagined that, were he to ever know those things, he were also to be without them again.

Or, in other words: Harry and Draco break up. 

**Before**

Harry meets Draco in a muggle pub three years after the war, and when Draco lets him strike up a conversation, Harry buys him a warm meal and a cold beer. Draco takes him home to his muggle London flat, and then he takes a shower. When he gets out in a towel, naked chest and all of its’ accompanying scars and marks on display, it is not entirely naïve; He stands in the doorway to the bedroom where Harry is watching his, it appears, homemade art, and leaves the decision up to him: Casual hook-up or something more.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Harry says. As he brushes past Draco’s shoulder to leave the room, he catches Draco smiling out of the corner of his eye.

 

That first night they share a bottle of wine on Draco’s bedroom floor and talk and talk and talk until their mouths are empty, and when they fall asleep they share the same covers.

**After**

Harry has his own London flat now. When he and Draco were together, Harry fell in love with two things: The boy and the city. He doesn’t have the boy anymore, but the city is one that will never leave, so Harry holds on to that, just as he tries to hold on to his sanity by going to bars and picking up guys who will touch him without fondness, but who won’t ask for love either.

Harry is, technically, rich, and his flat reflects that in the simple sense that it’s in a good neighbourhood and that his furniture is from places other than thrift stores and garage sales. This is privilege, but it doesn’t pass his notice how lifeless it is as well.

**Before**

Draco’s flat was full of discarded books and green plants; it was messy, but in an orderly sense, and upon reflection Harry saw how well that fit with Draco’s personality, especially counting in the change that had went through after the war.

Later, the flat is full of Harry as well.

At first it isn’t romantic or sexual. In fact, it’s mostly rather strange, as they try to dance around each other and rebuild their respective perceptions while being caught off guard by the way they seem to fit together like slightly wonky out-of-shape and broken puzzle pieces.

Harry cooks Draco a lot of food, because Draco is a bad eater, and in turn Draco lets their shoulders touch while they eat it on the couch. Along the way Harry buys him a plant, then two, then an art-print and an ugly souvenir, and along the way Draco starts laughing when Harry makes a joke, and sometimes he lets Harry stay the night in his bed.

**After**

Now, Harry mostly eats full meals when he is asked to dinner by his friends.

Ron and Hermione have moved in together in a little house in a mostly-wizards-and-witches-populated town. Harry got well acquainted with the nooks and crannies of the place the first weeks after him and Draco stopped being together, because he was so pathetic he needed to spend most of his days hanging out in their living room. He’s better now, or at least he’s better at faking to be.

Dinner talk is world reforming politics and wedding planning; not Ron and Hermione, not yet – George and Angelina.

Hermione is telling an anecdote from her ministry job that has them all in tears of laughter, and Harry has to spit his red wine back into his glass when she reaches the climax, so as not to spray it all over his two friends. He hasn’t felt this happy stomach-ache for a while, and for a moment it feels like “okay” might be within reach.

After the food Harry smokes a cigarette in the garden – a bad habit he has picked up from the London nightlife – when the door opens behind him, and the yellow light of ‘inside’ falls over the dew-wet grass for a moment. It’s Ron who joins him on the staircase in front of the door. He reaches out for the cigarette in request.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Harry says.

“Lets see what all the hype is about.” Harry hands the fag over, and watches with amusement as Ron inhales the smoke and coughs in discomfort.

“Gross,” he comments. Harry chuckles.

“So,” Ron says, after a few minutes of shared comfortable silence. “Obligatory how’s it going getting over D-face question?” Harry smiles to himself at the nickname.

“You know,” he says, but leaves it there. He doesn’t tell Ron about the blonde-haired, sarcastic young man he took home two nights ago, or how he swallowed his own name from the man’s lips, because no one else is allowed to say it like that.

“Right,” Ron says, like he understands. ’You know’ must have its’ own kind of subtext. “You’ll be fine though. Just wait for it.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, without really feeling it. “I’m always fine.”

**Before**

Flash backwards a little over one year, and Harry is sitting in a bar between the both of them when they ask him how his love life is going, and the question doesn’t carry a weight of worry. There is a half-empty shared plate of fries in the middle of the table, and three beers well nurtured by their sides.

“I met Draco not too long ago,” is Harry’s reply. At this point it had been a month since his and Draco’s bar-meeting, so it’s debatable how true the last part of that sentence is 

“Oh.”

“I’m sort of hanging out with him.”

“’Hanging out’ hanging out?” Ron asks.

“No,” Harry says. “Just … hanging out.” He chuckles. “Singular. I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind the other plural kind though.”

“Oh.”

There really isn’t much else to say, other than that when Harry says, “He’s changed,” Hermione pats his knee under the table and says, “I think this might be good for you. 

Hindsight sure is a pain in the arse.

**After**

Four days after the dinner, Harry goes to a club once again, and finds another man to make him forget for another night. The guy kisses him with as much fever as is usual when it comes to these encounters, but something about it feels wrong.

Maybe it’s that the guy has grey-blue eyes too, and is almost too similar. Maybe it’s that, for as long as he keeps doing this, Harry really isn’t fine. Either way, he pushes the man away from him again, and hands him a sorry apology.

That night, he goes home alone.

**Before**

Harry kisses Draco for the first time on a rainy Sunday in August.

They’re at the point where Harry has a phone charger in Draco’s bedroom, and a book or two on his coffee table. One of the socks he’s wearing belongs to Draco.

He wakes up alone in Draco’s bed to the sound of the shower running in the bathroom and raindrops hitting the window above the bed’s headboard. Everything is comfortable and languid. He snuggles into the duvet and keeps his eyes closed as he waits for Draco to return.

When he does, he’s wearing a towel around his waist, and his hair is dark and dripping a little down his shoulder-blades. Harry watches a single drop run its way down Draco’s back, as Draco bends down to fetch pants from a closet drawer, before the towel catches it. Fondness settles in his chest right below the place where his heart beats new, freshly oxygenated blood into his system. When Draco turns around, Harry smiles.

“Hey, you,” Draco says, and smiles too. A beat passes as he goes back to the closet to fetch a T-shirt and Harry simply watches him.

“You look like you did the first time you had me in this room,” Harry says. Draco’s smile turns smaller but fonder.

“Mm,” he mumbles. He turns, and gives Harry his full attention. Harry sits up.

“What would have happened if I’d kissed you that night?” he asks. Draco’s agreeable expression makes Harry brave. Draco bites his bottom lip; Harry’s eyes are drawn to it.

“I would have let you shag me,” Draco says.

“Would I still be here, like this?”

“Probably not,” Draco says. “I would likely have found entering into a shag-fest of a relationship with my old nemesis to be a bit of a bad idea.” Harry snorts.

“What about now?” he asks after another stretch of pondering silence.

“Mm?” Draco mumbles, this time in question, but the mischievous look on his face tells Harry that he already knows what Harry means. That he hasn’t turned around and left with that knowledge makes Harry find the bravery to say the next thing:

“What if I kissed you now?” At the words, Draco grins widely.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Why don’t you try?”

Harry grins too and gets out of the bed, so he can take a standing position in front of Draco. The other man watches him silently, as Harry takes his time to study all of Draco’s face, before he places his hand on his cheek, and the other at the nape of his neck, so he can play with the already-air-dried strands of hair there.

Harry kisses him. The first one is soft and sweet and gentle. Harry lets it linger, just the two of them sharing space and breathing in the same air through their noses. Then he pulls back and smiles against Draco’s chin. Draco smiles against the side of Harry’s nose, and then he nudges Harry back a little, so their lips can meet again.

This time it’s a bit harder, and then Harry finds Draco’s hands on his jaw and his tongue in his mouth, before he is pushed up against the closet. His hands find Draco’s hair, and he pulls a little at it, so Draco’s body is as closely pressed against his own as is possible while kissing is still going on. He hums happily into it and finds a smile pressed against his lips.

When they pull back for air their eyes meet, and then they are giggling.

“That was a pretty good idea, I think,” Draco says. Harry wants to explore every last inch of his skin with his fingertips.

“So about that shagging you mentioned?” he says, smirking. Draco laughs, and pulls down Harry’s pants in one swift movement in reply, so Harry tugs the towel off him and throws it in his face. Draco uses it to pull Harry in again, and then they’re back to the kissing. Harry thinks that’s really rather all right.

**After**

Back in real time it’s December, and Harry buys a tree and invites his friends over for Christmas pudding and homemade mulled wine. These kinds of events are always connected with a dilemma these days; when Draco and Harry were together, their two friend groups merged, and if you were to invite Dean and Seamus, you’d also have to invite Blaise and Pansy, and with them, D-face himself.

Harry invites them all, and simultaneously thanks God, and is rather sad, when Draco doesn’t show up. They watch The Grinch instead of Love Actually, and go into Harry’s liquor cabinet so they get drunk off their faces on Harry’s living room carpet.

Pansy makes out with Ginny somewhere in a corner when the clock passes midnight, which is a relationship rather in the developing phase, if in any phase at all, but other than that not too many disasters happen, and no one throws up, so all in all the night can be deemed rather successful.

Both Pansy and Blaise crash on Harry’s couch, but he gets into his own bed alone, and tries not to let the coldness of the sheets seep into his skin and bones and make him shake once more.

**Before**

Exactly a year before there had been a similar party, only this one was in Draco’s flat, and he was there in the corner of the room wearing an ugly Christmas sweater and a grin sparkling just as brightly as the fairy lights on the tree.

During that party Draco crawls into Harry’s lap and kisses him sweetly once the night hits the more alcohol-fuelled merry point, and Harry touches the low of his back with warm fingertips until Draco hums with content pleasure. Harry gets lost in him; in the taste of his mouth, and the feeling of his warm cheeks beneath his palms, and in the sight of Draco’s laughter lines crinkling by his eyes.

“You two are sickening,” Blaise tells them from the corner of the room, so they both chuckle and flip him the finger, and later, when there’s board games, Draco lies with his head in Harry’s lap and lets Harry run his fingers through his hair, and none of them bothers about who sees, because nobody really cares.

Upon five o’ clock, when people either go home or go to sleep, Harry crawls into Draco’s bed and curls into his body.

“That went well,” Draco says.

“Mm.” Harry kisses his temple, because that’s the part of him he can most easily reach.

“Our friends actually like each other. What an idea,” Draco ponders. Then, in joke: “Maybe that means that this was meant to be.”

Harry chuckles, but secretly thinks Draco might be telling the truth.

**After**

A week later Draco does show up to a thing where Harry is also present.

Pansy invites him to a downtown pub, and Harry can figure out who else will probably be there, but he goes anyway, and listens to the conversation of the table as he tries to prepare his brain for the prospect of seeing Draco again. It’s not that Harry hasn’t seen Draco since the day he stopped ‘seeing’ him, it’s just that it’s been rather a while, and his memory of him has got nothing on the actual, real-life Draco.

It takes him half an hour past the agreed time of meeting, but then Draco does show up, and he takes Harry’s breath away with his realness, and then even more when he catches Harry’s eye and smiles brightly for a moment, as if nothing bad had happened at all.

They end up by the bar, waiting to get new drinks. It’s not that it has to be the two of them; it’s just that Harry would like to see _Draco_ before he turns into extroverted-social-and-on-Draco. He’s not sure he’s part of the category that is allowed the former anymore, though.

Draco has blue and orange paint under his nails, and some of it dried on his fingers. Harry has to stop himself from touching it.

“You’re making art again,” he says.

“What?” Draco says, but then looks in the direction of Harry’s gaze, and watches his own hands. “Oh. Yeah.” He smiles at Harry, but it’s a bit too tense.

“Anything good?”

“I think so,” Draco says, and Harry smiles softly. Draco was always honest about his art and his feelings about it; if he liked it, he’d say so, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t just be acting modest. “It’s a sort of colour study. You know, the layers of one or two colours can make a whole picture, that kind of thing.”

“It sounds great,” Harry says, truthfully. “Philosophical, almost.” Draco smiles again, and this time it is almost genuine.

Harry pretends not to want to kiss it.

**Before**

The first time Draco painted with Harry around, they’d been together for rather a while, considering. Six months is a long time to Harry anyway.

He wakes up to an empty bed on the weekend, and when he goes to the kitchen for coffee he finds Draco sitting by a sparsely painted canvas in the living room. It makes Harry’s heart bloom, because it means trust and comfort; it means that Draco feels safe to act around Harry as he’d act if he were alone.

“Morning,” Harry calls across the kitchen counter, and Draco looks up to smile affectionately at him, before he returns his attention to the painting.

“Morning,” he replies, back at work.

“Coffee?” Harry asks.

“Mm. Yes, please.”

Harry brings it to him five minutes later, and gives him a kiss to his temple. Draco turns his head and catches Harry’s lips for a proper kiss, so Harry grabs his face and makes it a good one.

He pulls back a little, and has Draco’s lips on his jaw as he eyes the canvas.

“Do you want to discuss your concept now or later? Or never?” he asks. Draco chuckles.

“Later,” he says, so Harry kisses him once more, but then leaves him to work, settling into the couch with the book he’s currently reading instead.

 

Two hours later he is awoken by Draco who gently removes the book from where it has fallen to his chest. When he sees that Harry is awake, Draco joins him on the couch and sits astride his lap. Harry touches the paint that has somehow made its way to Draco’s eyebrow.

“Is it done?” he asks.

“No.” Draco kisses him gently. “I just wanted to do that for a little bit,” he says, so Harry kisses him back. It’s tender and unhurried, but there’s a slight tinge of something heavier behind it.

“I love you,” Draco says to Harry’s cheek, and Harry grins. It isn’t the first time they’ve said it – in fact they’ve said it enough times for it to be possessed by a casual air – but Harry still feels fondness blooming every time Draco says it.

“I know,” he says, because that’s the kind of thing he can do.

“No,” Draco, however, says. He pulls back enough for their eyes to meet.

“I love you,” he repeats himself, but Harry understands this time; this is truth-telling, it’s thank you for letting me, and thank you for being here. It’s ‘I feel this so deeply I’m not quite sure how to handle it.’

Harry breathes in and touches Draco’s cheekbones. “I know,” he says again, but this time it means ‘I know, and I understand, and I feel that as well.’ “I love you, too.”

Draco smiles and pushes himself into Harry’s hands, so Harry holds him tight.

**After**

During a late, insomniac night, Harry drinks a bottle of wine he finds in the back of one of his cupboards, and cleans out his closet at three in the morning, half drunk and half just exhausted.

In the back of the wardrobe he finds a pile of Draco’s colourful socks that he’s thrown away to escape them whenever he’s found them lying around. He also finds one of his own oversized band tees and a slightly scruffy grey sweatshirt, and sits with them in his lap on the floor of his room and tries very hard to breathe normally.

**Befor**

Everything isn’t always sweet and easy-peasy between them.

They both have their PTSDs and their nightmares of death and killings. When Draco is sad he will wear Harry’s old way-too-large-on-him band tee and press himself into Harry’s hands under the covers, the blinds drawn against the daylight, and he’ll sleep, never letting go of Harry’s hands.

 

They also, despite their love, have their sometimes-conflicting personalities.

Some ten months into their relationship they sit together in Draco’s windowsill and smoke a cigarette, looking out on the London rooftops, when Harry asks Draco if he believes in soulmates.

“No,” Draco says. He’s wearing Harry’s grey sweatshirt.

“No?”

Draco shrugs. “It doesn’t add up,” he says. “There’s only one person out there for you? What are the chances of finding that one person, then?”

A hundred, for us, Harry thinks, but doesn’t say.

“And then you spend every other relationship you’re in calculating if they’re your absolutely _perfect_ match, if they’re you’re soul mate, and if there are problems along the way you just leave?”

“You don’t think I’m your perfect match?” Harry asks. Draco sighs, and it’s definitely not content like the way he sighs when Harry kisses him; it’s annoyed.

“I’m saying I don’t think that’s a thing,” he says. His tone has an edge to it. “There are people in the world, and some of them you are compatible with – that number might be big or small. If you’re lucky, love happens. If you’re really lucky, you both decide to choose to be with the other person.”

Harry doesn’t know what to say. He’s been in relationship before where he thought he had that, and they still went down the drain. He always thought that maybe they just weren’t the right one. Draco is, he knows. He wants him to be. He wants to be secure that this will last.

“Then you have no guarantee,” he says. Draco watches him.

“No,” he says. “You never do. But you have control."

“I’m tired of control,” Harry mumbles. It’s all he’s ever had; control and difficult decisions. Too many choices, and none of them the good option; none of them right. Draco smiles softly and a little sadly.

“I’m tired of the lack of it,” he says.

**After** **  
**

George and Angelina get married.

Harry goes to the wedding and sits on the second row behind all of the extended Weasley family, and the relatively limited number of Johnson’s.

The ceremony has a lot of tears; both happy and sad, especially during the vows when Angelina says, “You told me, some time after the war, that, if we could make it through the next year or two, we’d be able to make it through anything,” and they all know that she’s referring to Fred’s death.

“Well, here we are,” she continues and everyone laughs; relieved. “I made a choice that day, when you said those things, to stay and to fight, just like we’d fought in the war. And what I’m saying here today, what ‘for better and for worse’ really means, is this: I choose you. For the rest of my life, every single day, I make the choice to give all of myself to you, and accept all of your self in return.”

‘Oh,’ Harry thinks. ‘Well, shit.’

**Before**

They break up a little over a month after the soulmate conversation.

“Maybe you should see other people,” he says to Draco in the kitchen one night when neither of them can fall asleep. Draco, who has been leaning against his shoulder, takes a step away from him.

“What?”

“If you’re not sure about this.” Harry watches as Draco’s expression changes from shock to hurt to anger and to hurt again. He takes another step back.

“That’s not what I was saying at all,” he says, and his voice is low and tense with barely contained temper.

“Wasn’t it?” Harry knows he’s simply being hurtful back now, because what Draco said hurt him, but the momentum catches him, and he can’t get himself to stop the words before they come out.

Draco watches him for a second, before he mumbles “Oh my God,” and holds his hand up to his face as he walks past Harry and over by the couch, turning his back to him. Harry feels his control of the situation slipping out between his fingertips.

“Do you _want_ me to see other people?”

The question hangs in the air between them, unanswered. Draco stands across the room from Harry, with his arms across his chest, and pain on his features. He’s wearing Harry’s grey sweatshirt again. The image will haunt Harry for months.

“Maybe you could love someone else more.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Draco’s expression morphs into an anger that is unlike anything Harry has ever seen on his face before; It looks so deeply rooted that Harry isn’t even surprised when Draco says, “Get out.” Harry doesn’t move.

“Get the fuck out!” This time he’s yelling, and Harry watches as he scratches at the sweatshirt that belongs to Harry before pulling it off and throwing it after him.

“Go away,” Draco says. He looks defeated as he picks up the band T-shirt from the floor. “And take your fucking stuff with you,” he says, and throws that shirt at Harry’s face as well.

Harry is still frozen on the spot, unable to grasp what is happening right now.

“Go away,” Draco begs, desperate by now. “Go.” His voice breaks off in a sob.

Eventually, when Draco starts pushing him out the door, Harry does. The door is slammed behind him.

**After**

Six months later Harry is back at Draco’s front door, for the first time since that night, and the door is opened again.

Behind it he finds Draco, sleepy-looking Draco, 2am Draco, scruffy-and-comfortable-in-his-own-home Draco. Draco who is watching him, looking him up and down, taking in the suit and the frantic breath, probably, and then Draco who silently steps to the side to allow Harry inside once more.

“Don’t play games with me,” he says when he’s made them both tea and they’re sitting across from each other by the kitchen counter. Harry shakes his head. Smiles softly.

“I understand now,” he says.

“Do you?”

“Yes.” Harry is secure. He lets his fingertips touch Draco’s where they are bended around his cup. Draco watches and lets him. “I believe in faith. You believe in choosing. Now that I understand, I might believe in choosing too.”

Draco smiles; barely, but it’s there just enough for Harry to see it.

“The important part is, we both believe in us. Wait–” he interrupts himself. For this he makes sure that Draco is watching him, listening, by catching his eye: “We both _choose_ us.”

Draco smiles for real at that, and then he cries. Harry lets him, and then does too. Draco chuckles between his tears when Harry squeezes his hand, so Harry gets up and walks around the counter to meet him.

“Can I–“ he asks, but Draco kisses him before he can finish the question.

When they pull apart, it’s only to hold each other so tightly that the pain stops. Harry cries into Draco’s neck in relief, and allows his own shirt to get wet with Draco’s tears.

“I hate you,” Draco whispers, but it’s fond. Harry kisses him again. 

‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

**Author's Note:**

> Do shoot me a comment if you liked it or have any thoughts, won't you? They make me smile greatly.


End file.
